Mansioncraft!

Col Fetters builds a house I’ll never afford to live in. Great!

Are you a multi-millionaire looking for the perfect home to show off what a multi-millionaire you are? Worried you’ll look silly compared to Beyoncé and Jay-Z? Well fear no more, incredibly wealthy person that I would like to be! I have just the place for you.

Built by Col Fetters, this mansion sits right by the coast and boasts a mind-boggling number of features and facilities, including a boathouse, rooftop lounge, gazebo by the beach. You name it, this place probably has it.

“Not being a millionaire myself,” says Col Fetters, when I ask him about the sprawling household, “I had to look up what types of rooms would be found in a house like this. I'm sure I got a few details wrong - so, millionaires, feel free to chime in here!”

Sure, Col Fetters is not a millionaire rockstar himself, but he is a big fan of architecture and has always been very creative. For him, building is a creative outlet, one most often inspired by his love of the medieval style and historical castles. He explains, “I’m constantly observing the world around me, and if I see an interesting building or a historical castle in a book or on TV, I get the urge to see if I can make my own version of it.”

Of course, the Beachside Mansion is a big departure from a medieval castle. This is a house that puts the entire back catalog of celebrity dwellings on Cribs to shame (if you’ve never heard of Cribs it’s an MTV sho… wait, what am I doing? You’ve never heard of Cribs! Congratulations! Do yourself a favour, never find out what it is!)

“I usually build in the medieval-style,” Col Fetters tells me, “but recently I had been building a few suburban-style houses using the Flows HD texture pack and was really enjoying the change.” In particular, Col Fetters found one Let’s Build video to be very inspiring. “[YouTuber AndyisYoda was building a mansion using the texture pack from his creative server - Use The Blocks. I loved the look of the re-textured blocks and decided to download it and try my hand at a mansion-style house.”

He also used WorldEdit through Forge, but insists this is merely a time-saving endeavour and not for the purposes of creating something otherwise impossible. In fact, he’s tried making this exact build in vanilla Minecraft too and though it’s entirely doable, he says “it looks awful!”

“To be fair,” he continues, “it was built using block textures that don't exist in the vanilla game. I think that if I had built it using the default textures from the start it would have turned out OK.”

I think Col Fetters has done mansions across the globe proud. Or else, maybe he’s just made them feel really self-conscious. It has everything that I never knew I wanted in a house, and then some. So, is this his aspiration? The dream home?

“I’m not going to lie,” says Col Fetters when I ask, “I would love to own this house - who wouldn’t? But I don’t know that I would call it an aspiration. It’s one of my most ambitious projects and I’m pretty pleased with what it’s become.”

Frankly, I am amazed at his lack of enthusiasm for it. Think of all the clothes it would take to cover that floor! I would have so many clothes, and all of them would be Ryan Gosling’s jacket from the new Blade Runner. But that’s just me. I ask Col Fetters what he’d do with the place if it was his private home.

“Well,” he starts, “if this was my house I’d definitely take advantage of the private rooftop lounge. A couple of my favourite spots are the basement den, the beachside gazebo - with all of the sea breezes and none of the sand! - and the pool. I’m also a biologist and love the outdoors, so I would probably spend a lot of time out on one of the boats fishing. Although I should probably spend some quality time in the gym…”

Col Fetters knew about Minecraft long before he started playing it because of his work as a school teacher. “I teach science,” he tells me, “and I do use Minecraft as an example when we talk about natural resources and competition for those resources. When we talk about geology I usually have to dispel the myth that bedrock is some extremely tough rock found deep underground, and that there aren't actually huge pools of lava and diamonds under everyone's feet. Although digging straight down is still always a bad idea.

"I have found however that lots of kids now know that glass comes from molten sand and that "smelting" metals is a real thing. Plus a lot of kids are surprised when they find out their teacher plays Minecraft too. After seeing some of my builds a student challenged me to recreate our school. So far I've got a foundation laid out using our emergency fire escape map, it's going to take a while…”

I can’t wait to see how it turns out. Rooftop lounge above the science lab? A massive jacuzzi in which I can read books from the library? Maybe even a home cinema where I can not do my homework! Yeah, I didn't do well at school.